Perfection

Dave Hyde, Bob Griese

Description

The inside story of the only undefeated team in NFL history, the 1972 Miami Dolphins?by the Hall of Fame quarterback who led it to victory

Hall of Fame quarterback and long-time ABC college football announcer Bob Griese is a living football legend. Now, on the 40th anniversary of the 1972 Miami Dolphins' incredible championship season, Griese tells the behind-the-scenes story of the team both on and off the field as it achieved a feat no other team has ever succeeded in matching: perfection.

You'll see Griese shocked in his first meeting with Joe Robbie as the Dolphins owner balanced big contract figures and a staggering number of drinks. You'll hear Griese meeting Don Shula for the first time and being ordered to start staying in the pass pocket rather than scrambling. "Build me a pocket and I'll stay in it,'' Griese told Shula. You'll understand the friendship and on-field relationship developed between Griese and Paul Warfield after they became the Dolphins' first inter-racial roommates.

You'll follow Griese through a storied season that began with him wondering just how good the Dolphins actually were and ended with him awarding the game ball in the winning Super Bowl locker room. Along the way you'll hear:

• How Shula implemented and Griese embraced the first use of situation substitution in the NFL and the controversy it caused in a backfield of Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Mercury Morris
• The lengths to which NFL players of that era kept themselves on the field, including regular trips from the hospital bed to the playing field
• Insight and anecdotes from Hall of Fame players Warfield, Csonka, Nick Buoniconti, Jim Langer, and Larry Little as well as Griese

Packed with behind-the-scenes drama and on-the-field excitement, Perfection is a book every football fan will want to read.

Prologue 1

1 Are We Really That Good? 7

2 Three Men and the Backfield 15

3 The Education of a Quarterback 27

4 The Color of Miami 45

5 My Sunday Nightmare 63

6 Pain and Other Inconveniences 79

7 The Architect 97

8 The Names behind the No-Name Defense 115

9 The Man Who Fired Flipper—and Built a Dynasty 127

10 Too Small, Too Short, Too Much 145

11 Howard and Us 157

12 Shula: A Study in Character 163

13 A Partnership of Opposites 173

14 The Mushrooms 189

15 The Next Season 209

16 Sweet Returns 215

17 Perfection 223

Index 253

Sujets

• Sport
• Sports collectifs
• Rugby & Football américain
• Sports
• 1972 Miami Dolphins season
• Dave Hyde
• Recreation
• Miami Dolphins
• Don Shula
• Football
• Bob Griese
• Perfection
• Dolphins de Miami
• Super Bowl
• National Football League
• Miami
• Rugby

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 17 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781118282373
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1: Are We Really That Good?
Chapter 2: Three Men and the Backfield
Chapter 3: The Education of a Quarterback
Chapter 4: The Color of Miami
Chapter 5: My Sunday Nightmare
Chapter 6: Pain and Other Inconveniences
Chapter 7: The Architect
Chapter 8: The Names behind the No-Name Defense
Chapter 9: The Man Who Fired Flipper—and Built a Dynasty
Chapter 10: Too Small, Too Short, Too Much
Chapter 11: Howard and Us
Chapter 12: Shula: A Study in Character
Chapter 13: A Partnership of Opposites
Chapter 14: The Mushrooms
Chapter 15: The Next Season
Chapter 16: Sweet Returns
Chapter 17: Perfection
Plates
Index

Copyright © 2012 by Bob Griese and Dave Hyde. All rights reserved
Photo credits: all images courtesy of the Miami Dolphins Cover image: © Neil Leifer Collection/Getty Images Cover design: Jose Alamaguer
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Griese, Bob. Perfection : the inside story of the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ perfect season / by Bob Griese & Dave Hyde. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-118-21809-9 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-28689-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-28237-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-28396-7 (ebk) 1. Miami Dolphins (Football team) I. Hyde, Dave, 1961– II. Title. GV956.M47G75 2012 796.332′6409759381–dc23
To Coach Shula and all those Dolphins fans who keep the spirit of ’72 alive
Prologue
Let’s start with a story. A small story. One that’s true and timely and that translates what it was like to be quarterback for the Miami Dolphins on the magic carpet ride of 1972.
It starts in my realty office that off-season. The phone rang. An actress wanted to sell her home, and she asked me to be the listing agent. I was delighted. Listings are the lifeblood of any Realtor, after all, and this sounded like a good one. That meant business for me in an era when most players conducted some form of business in the off-season. We didn’t work out every day like today’s athletes do. We just worked. Regular jobs. Regular hours. Just like the regular people we were.
Jim Langer, our Hall of Fame center, was a bank teller. Manny Fernandez, the anchor of our defensive line, earned five dollars an hour as a carpenter on construction sites. Larry Little, our Hall of Fame guard, was a substitute teacher, regularly breaking up racial fights in high school hallways during these turbulent times.
You see, lottery money wasn’t part of our athletic dream in those days. Nick Buoniconti, our Hall of Fame linebacker, began playing professional football with the modest dream of making enough money to drive a new Buick and to pay off his $20,000 home mortgage. By 1972 he surpassed those dreams, in part because he pushed himself through law school while playing in Boston. He joined a law firm in Miami.
Football, we knew, took you only so far. Half the players on our undefeated team earned $20,000 or less playing pro football. Their earnings were more than doubled by the $25,000 they won in that year’s postseason. Dick Anderson, our great safety, tells how he made more money ($120,000) on the Celebrity Golf Tour in 1994 than in his first five seasons combined with the Dolphins ($109,500). And it wasn’t just the players who appreciated that additional postseason money. Howard Schnellenberger, our offensive coordinator, took that money and got himself out of debt for the first time in his life.
The millions showered upon today’s athletes were unimaginable back then. And not just to us players. To everyone. My aunt Lorraine and uncle Fred were visiting from Indiana at about this time. A limousine stopped before them outside the Miami airport. A man in cap and livery jumped out, identified himself as “Bob Griese’s chauffeur,” and took their luggage. Another man, in cap and bushy mustache in the passenger seat, identified himself as my butler.
“I’ll be taking you to Mr. Griese’s mansion,” the chauffeur said.
My aunt and uncle were stunned. They knew I made decent money, but this was beyond anything they expected. A chauffeur? A butler? Even a mansion for their young nephew?
The butler turned in his seat to look at them.
“Bob?” Uncle Fred said.
I smiled.
“Bob, is that you?”
I laughed. I couldn’t play out the practical joke anymore. I had rented the limo and dressed the part to have some fun. It was fantasy to think in terms of actually having that life.
So after getting the phone call from the actress, I drove to Pembroke Pines and inspected her home. Upon arriving, I was surprised by the revealing outfit she wore.
She’s really Hollywood, I thought.
She had lunch waiting for just the two of us.
That’s unusual, I thought.
Then, on the tour of her home, she lingered in the bedroom. And lingered. Even my small-town, midwestern, naive sensibilities began to understand what was at work. I explained that I was married, and tried to leave as quickly and quietly as possible.
Needless to say, I didn’t get that listing.
But this was when I first realized that fame and the accompanying idea of celebrity were becoming part of the equation of a Dolphin player. In my first few years in Miami, pro football was background music in a resort town. We never had more than four wins in a season. Our games were some of the least-attended in the American Football League, averaging just 35,116 fans in the cavernous Orange Bowl in 1969.
Then Don Shula arrived as coach, and everything changed overnight. He showed how one person can change the entire dynamic of a team. We began winning. We became a show. Our attendance doubled by 1971 when we made it to the Super Bowl. For the 1972 season, 5,000 bleacher seats were added to accommodate the demand. We averaged more than 78,000 fans per game that year. By 1973, we had that many season-ticket holders—the most ever for a pro sports franchise—and the publisher of Sports Illustrated wrote, “Possibly no city in the United States is as maniacal about one team as is Miami about the Dolphins.”
The city’s transit system adopted the Dolphins’ aqua-and-orange colors for their buses. A highway was renamed “Dolphin Expressway.” I was one of eight Dolphins who had regular radio shows—nine, if you include Paul Warfield offering his “Thought of the Day” program on one station. We became so associated with winning that at the annual meeting of Manufacturers Life Insurance, the president challenged his salesmen to rise to the top like the Dolphins, even passing out Dolphins T-shirts to the board of directors.
At this time, the sight of a full Orange Bowl was unforgettable. And not just to me. Vern Den Herder walked into it for the first time as a rookie in 1971 and was so awed by the sights and sounds of a place that held thirty times the population of his hometown of Sioux Center, Iowa, that he took a mental snapshot. Thousands of fans waved white handkerchiefs. The noise vibrated from the ground. And the passion at those games? In one telling moment that 1972 season, Buffalo quarterback Dennis Shaw settled under center six times and backed away each time because the crowd prevented teammates from hearing his signals. The game was delayed for seven minutes. Dolphin radio announcer Rick Weaver pleaded to those fans with transistor radios to have their neighbors quiet down. That didn’t help. Only when Shula held up his hands for the crowd to lower the volume did it obey. Shaw came to the line, dropped to pass, and was promptly sacked by Manny Fernandez and Bob Matheson. The cascade of boos immediately converted into such a thunderous roar that that held up the game, too.
This was a different town, a different time. In this Miami, even Stephanie Noonan, the wife of wide receiver Karl Noonan, who was injured that season, signed a check at a store and heard the clerk